The Reaches

She shook her head in puzzlement, trying to remember what it was she'd meant to say. 'Look, why don't you go off to bed now, Dad?'

'Here, you sit down,' Marcus said. He tossed off the sheet covering him, then rose from the divan by shifting his torso forward and catching himself with his cane before he fell back. 'I'll scramble some eggs for you. You always liked my eggs, didn't you, Sallie?'

'Dad, I'm not. .' Sal muttered. Maybe I'm hungry after all. Her legs weren't working right, certainly. She flopped into the straight-backed chair by the little table. She teetered for a moment but didn't fall over.

'Some food will be good, Sallie,' Marcus said as he shuffled into the kitchenette adjacent to the front room. 'Don't I know it. I've had my nights out partying too, you know.'

Sal moved the lamp, certain that Marcus' bottle was on the other side of it. There was no bottle on the table. She frowned and bent over to see if the liquor was on the floor beside the divan. There wouldn't be much left, of course, but. .

No bottle on the floor either.

'Ferlinghetti at the Fiddler's Green was saying the Southern ship your squadron captured was as rich a prize as any Captain Ricimer ever brought back,' Marcus said. Eggs spattered on hot grease.

'Richer than that,' Sal said absently. 'Where's your bottle, Dad?'

They'd stumbled into the Mae do Deus on Callisto, where the crew had attempted to conceal their 2,000-tonne monster when they heard Piet Ricimer was out with a squadron. The vessel had been one of the largest merchantmen of the Southern Cross before President Pleyal's coup de main six years before absorbed what had been a separate nation into the North American Federation.

'Ah, you know, Sallie dearest, I'm not sure there is a bottle in the apartment,' her father said in brittle cheeriness. 'I'll have to pick something up, won't I?'

'What d'ye mean, there's no bottle?' Sal shouted. She stood halfway up, lost her balance, and sat back down with a crash that jolted her spine all the way to the base of her skull.

Marcus' fork clinked busily against the pan, stirring in the spices and pepper sauce. 'Fullerenes from the Mirrorside,' he said as if he hadn't heard his daughter. 'Worth more than microchips are, Ferlinghetti says.'

'You bet,' Sal agreed morosely. 'A captain's share of what we took from the Mae. . I'm a rich girl, Daddy. Your little Sal is rich, rich, rich.'

She reached into the right-hand pocket of her loose tunic and brought out a liter bottle of amber Terran whiskey. It was nearly full. She couldn't remember how it had gotten there.

'Sing praises to our God and king. .' Sal warbled, trying to open the bottle. After three failures, she squinted carefully and saw that the bottle had a screw cap instead of the plug stopper she was used to.

Marcus lifted the pan and scraped eggs onto a serving plate. 'Ah, Sal?' he said nervously. 'I thought that tonight you might, you know, have something to eat and go to bed. Instead of stay-'

'Who the hell are you to think anything, you damned old drunk?' Sal shouted. She stood up. The chair overset in one direction and the table in another. 'I'll go to sleep when I'm damned-'

The lamp with a bubble-thin shade the color of a monarch butterfly's wing was Venerian ceramic. It hit the floor and bounced, chiming in several keys but undamaged. The glass bottle from Earth shattered in a spray of liquor.

'Oh, the bastards,' Sal said. Her body swayed. 'Oh, the dirty bastards.'

Marcus scuffled across the room and embraced her. 'Let's have a little something to eat, Sallie my love,' he said. 'You like my eggs, don't you, dear?'

'It'd be all right if I'd seen his face before I shot him,' Sal whispered as she hugged her father.

'Sallie?' Marcus said.

'On Arles,' she said, thinking she was explaining. 'Every night he comes to me and he's a different face. I could take one, that'd be, that'd be. . But he's different every night, and then mush. Red mush, dad. One after another and then they die.'

'Oh, Sallie,' Marcus said. 'Oh, my little baby girl.'

Sal shuddered and drew herself upright. 'That's all right, Dad,' she said. 'I appreciate the trouble you took, but I'm going out for a bit, I think. I'll be back, you know, later.'

'Sal, please don't go out again tonight,' Marcus pleaded.

Captain Sarah Blythe, heroine of Venus' struggle against Federation tyranny, closed the door behind her. The night clerk at the baths usually had a bottle under his counter.

BETAPORT, VENUS

July 1, Year 27

1412 hours, Venus time

'What do you think of them, Gregg?' said Alexi Mostert, gesturing as he shouted over the echoing racket of the New Dock. 'All three of them as handy as the Wrath, and their scantlings just as sturdy.'

'We've spread the nozzle clusters,' Siddons Mostert added from Stephen's other side. 'Another ten centimeters between adjacent thrusters to improve hover performance.'

The vessels in the three nearest cradles were purpose-built warships; like the Wrath, as even Stephen could see, but the finer points of construction were as much beyond his capacity to judge as they were outside his interests. It was inconceivable that the Mostert brothers had invited him here to talk about scantlings and hover performance.

'Ships are things that I ride on, gentlemen,' Stephen said dryly. 'I'm sure Piet would be delighted to discuss the way the Wrath handled, if you want to talk with him.'

The twenty-odd ships fitting out in the gigantic New Dock were either state-owned or under contract to the governor's forces. Access to the dock was limited for fear of sabotage. A platoon of black-armored Governor's Guards at the entrance checked the sailors, workmen, and carters flowing into New Dock at all hours, and there were parties of armed men aboard each vessel.

Stephen suspected that the guards were a psychological exercise thought up by Councilor Duneen or another of the governor's close advisors rather than a response to real concerns. Through the guards' presence, Governor Halys said to the people of Venus, 'The Federation threat is real and imminent, and the sacrifices you will shortly be called on to make are justified.'

The governor was right about the threat, at least. Stephen Gregg, who knew as much about sacrifice as the next person, would have been uncomfortable urging it on anyone else.

'Yes, Factor Ricimer is a marvelous sailor, isn't he?' Siddons said. 'And marvelously lucky as well. Snapping up the Mae do Deus like that!'

Siddons was a tall, slightly hunched man with the solemn mien of a preacher. He was the elder brother by two years and looked considerably older than that, although the close-coupled Alexi had spent far more of his life in the hardships and deprivations of long voyages. Alexi Mostert continued to lead an occasional argosy even now that he'd been appointed Chief Constructor of the Fleet.

'If you call that luck,' Stephen said with a cold smile. 'Piet interviewed prisoners at Winnipeg and learned the ship was already overdue. He calculated her back-course and plotted the locations where her captain might lay up if he learned the Earth Approaches were too risky.'

'Ah,' Alexi said, nodding in understanding.

'Very simple in hindsight, isn't it, gentlemen?' Stephen said. 'Good preparation often makes a task look easy.'

'I think back to the days we were shipmates, Piet and I,' Alexi said with forced heartiness. 'And you too, Gregg. We paid a price, we did, but it was worth it for Venus' sake! There's bigger things than any one man.'

Stephen looked at Mostert and shrugged. Alexi Mostert had lost all his teeth while starving on a hellish voyage back from the Reaches, where the Feds had ambushed what was meant to be a peaceful trading expedition. There'd been fifteen survivors out of more than a hundred men crammed aboard a ship that was damaged escaping.

'I don't know what anything's worth, Mostert,' Stephen said.